The Baker’s Daughter (7 page)

“She could have made time,” Mrs. Bulloch returned, “and ye'll remember she said that Grace was too inquisitive—who minds folks being inquisitive unless they've something to hide?”

“Ye're thinking—”

“I'm not thinking anything, Thomas,” said Mrs. Bulloch somewhat inaccurately, and she took up her half-knitted sock.

His willow picture finished, Darnay had started on an entirely different regime. Instead of working day after day at the same subject, he moved about, ranging the countryside, and brought back sketches and queer half-finished studies of clouds and bare trees and rolling hills. These he stuck up in his studio on a shelf he had made himself, and sometimes Sue, going in to call him to a meal, would find him standing in the middle of the room, staring at them, his hands in his pockets and an unlit pipe in his mouth.

When Sue got back from Beilford, after her visit to the Bullochs, she found Darnay sitting in the kitchen reading
The Scotsman
. “It's warmer here,” he told her, somewhat apologetically, for he was aware that Miss Bun was a stickler for propriety and liked him to keep to his own part of the house.

“You should have kept up the fire in the lounge,” said Sue sternly. “I knew how it would be if I went out.”

Darnay smiled. It amused him to be called to order by his housekeeper. She was such a quaint little creature, so practical and serious, and yet with a sense of humor all her own.

“What have you got there?” he asked as she laid her parcels down on the table. “What's this, eh?”

He pointed to a quarterly magazine that Sue had purchased in Beilford. It was titled
Brothers of the Brush
and the outside cover displayed a highly colored reproduction of a surrealist painting.

She blushed. She had bought the magazine with the idea of educating herself in art so that the next time Darnay asked her to give her opinion on a picture she would know exactly what to say. Glancing through it on the bus, she had seen at once that it was the very thing she wanted—when she had mastered this she would no longer be an uneducated savage in his eyes.

“Miss Bun!” he said, half laughing and half serious. “Miss Bun, I won't have it. You were going to study this frightful monstrosity in secret—deny it if you dare—and in a few days I should have had you prattling to me about depth and grouping and impasto—and oh, how I should have hated it!”

“But I thought—”

“It does credit to the kindness of your heart that you were willing to take all this trouble, but believe me, I prefer my gentle savage, my Woman Friday.”

“I could learn,” she began breathlessly.

“You could learn,” he agreed quite gravely. “You could learn all the jargon of the art critic—there isn't a doubt of that—but it would take you years of study to even begin to understand what you were talking about.”

She gazed at him wide-eyed. “Then it's no good,” she said hopelessly. “I could never be any help.”

“But you are a help!” he cried. “That's what I'm trying to tell you. You taught me more about my picture in two minutes than the best art critic in London could have taught me in half an hour.”

“I only said—” began Sue, unable to believe her ears.

“I don't know
what
you said,” cried Darnay excitedly. “I neither know nor care. All I know is that you made me see what I was doing and turned me from the path before it was too late. Your vision is intuitive and unspoiled—do you understand?”

It was the first time he had ever asked her if she understood what he meant, and Sue realized the importance of this. Hitherto he had talked on, not caring whether she understood or not—he had talked to please himself, because he felt like talking and there was no one else there—but now he was actually talking to
her
, communing with her as a person, anxious for her to understand his point.

“I don't think I do understand…altogether,” admitted Sue.

“You know nothing, but you can see clearly with your eyes. You're not muddled up with a lot of other people's ideas about pictures,” Darnay explained carefully. “That's quite clear, isn't it?”

“Yes,” said Sue meekly. “I won't read it, then.”

The magazine was lying on the table between them. Sue pushed it toward him and Darnay picked it up and dropped it into the fire. It went to Sue's heart to see the magazine consumed (she had paid a shilling for it), but she made no move to stop him, and the two of them watched it burn. At first the flames licked around the edges of the glazed paper, charring and blackening the leaves, and then as it grew hotter, the whole book burst into flames and subsided into a mass of black fragments.

Darnay looked at Sue speculatively. “Tomorrow I shall paint
you
,” he said and lay back in the chair with a sigh.

Sue had not forgotten that she was going to be painted, but she imagined, in her ignorance of painters and their whims, that Darnay would await her convenience. She had her work to do, and work was more important than painting. Sue was busy scrubbing the kitchen floor when Darnay appeared at the door and announced that he was ready.

“But
I'm
not,” said Sue, plunging her scrubbing brush into the pail and retreating another yard onto the dry part of the floor. “I've got the potatoes to peel when I've finished this, and the pudding to make—maybe I'll be ready about noon.”

“Maybe you'll come now—this very minute,” declared Darnay, laughing. “The kitchen floor won't run away, and we'll have bread and cheese for lunch.”

“What!” cried Sue. “But I can't leave all the work and—”

“You can and will.”

She looked up at him and saw to her dismay that he was quite serious and determined. She would have to go, that was obvious, and perhaps if she gave in and went now she could escape later and get the dinner on. The kitchen floor would have to wait until the afternoon.

“I'll go change my dress,” she said, rising reluctantly from her knees.

His eyes narrowed. “I'll paint you like that,” he said. “No, don't take that thing off your head. I like it.”

“It's a
duster
!” Sue cried.

“I don't care what it is.”

“You're never going to paint my picture with an old duster on my head?”

“I'm going to paint you
just like that
,” he declared firmly.

Sue sat down on the chair that he had arranged for her. She was miserable and nervous. She had had her photograph taken at the Beilford Gallery and had hated it, but this was much worse.

“How will I sit?” she inquired.

“Sit naturally,” he replied, moving his easel slightly and gazing at her with a strange impersonal expression in his eyes.

Sue composed herself carefully and hardened every muscle into rigid stone.

“Good heavens!” Darnay cried. “Is that a natural position for you to sit in? Would it be natural for anybody to look like that? Are you supposed to represent Marie Antoinette driving to the scaffold or what?”

Sue lifted her chin and replied with asperity, quite forgetting about her pose. Darnay began to paint.

He had intended merely to make a few rough studies of Miss Bun's head, but he found his new subject so intriguing that his intentions vanished into thin air. It was not until he had started to paint her that he discovered she was beautiful—not beautiful perhaps by the usual canons, but beautiful in her own way. In most people of Darnay's world, there are several strains, blending sometimes into beauty and sometimes not, but Miss Bun's ancestors were all Lowland Scots—a long line stretching back for centuries. He thought of this as he painted and saw her pedigree written in the pure lines of her face, and he saw—or thought he saw—that this purity of race must produce beauty, a beauty of its own that may or may not be attractive to an alien eye.
For instance
, thought Darnay
, we may not admire the golden skin and slant eyes of the pure Mongol, but who can dare to say that the Mongol has no beauty of his own? If we do not believe that purity of race is beauty then we deny God and God's hand in our making—in the making of the races of the world.
Anthropology had always interested Darnay—anthropology from a painter's angle. It was a matter of bones beneath that outer layer of flesh and skin that produced certain differences of curve and contour indigenous to the race from which the subject sprang. Most of the people Darnay knew were mongrels in that sense. His own wife, Elise, had a French mother and he himself a Norwegian grandmother (who had probably contributed certain characteristics of her race to his tall, spare frame and the bony structure of his head). Mongrels, thought Darnay, may be attractive or even beautiful in their early youth, but they seldom age well. Miss Bun belonged to the soil upon which she had been born and bred. She would grow into a beautiful old woman—the sort that Rembrandt loved to paint.

These were fascinating conjectures, but Darnay could not pursue them as he wished, for as soon as he left off talking Miss Bun became aware of her face. The whole thing was a damned nuisance. He should never have started on a portrait of Miss Bun; he should have stuck to his trees and clouds as he had intended. Now that he had started it was impossible to stop—the beautiful faded blue of that thing on her head, and the gorgeous hair, dark as chocolate with red and gold lights, and the creamy skin. He must talk though, for again that Medusa look had petrified the delicious curves of jaw and neck.

“I shall make some studies of you first,” he told her, “and then a proper portrait. Perhaps I'll paint you out of doors with one of your own hills for a background. Do you love your country, Miss Bun?”

“I like it well enough,” replied Sue, somewhat embarrassed by the word.

“Have you ever been to London?”

“No, the only city I've been to is Edinburgh. Sometimes I've thought it would be grand fun to live in a city.”

“It isn't,” Darnay told her, dabbing at the canvas with his brush. “Don't you believe it, Miss Bun. You need a hide like a rhinoceros to live in a city—and your hide is thinner than most.”

“But why?”

“Because if you walk in a city you're jostled by hundreds of indifferent people with indifferent eyes that look at you as if you weren't there at all. You begin to feel you must be invisible. Hundreds and thousands of eyes, and not one pair really seeing you or caring who you are. I'd rather walk down Beilford High Street and know that everybody was saying, ‘There goes the mad painter!' It's better to be mad than invisible.”

She wondered about that, and he painted her eyes, longing to say, “Hold it, keep like that for five minutes—or even for one,” but refraining because he knew it would spoil everything.

“The city is impermanent,” he continued, rattling on and hardly knowing what he said. “It is the country that goes on, forever the same. D'you know Hardy's poem about the man harrowing his field? You've often seen men harrowing, haven't you? The words give you the actual feel of the earth turning over.

“Only a man harrowing clods

In a slow silent walk,

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

Half asleep as they stalk.

“Only thin smoke without flame

From the heaps of couch grass,

Yet this will go onward the same

Though dynasties pass.”

It was twenty-five minutes to one when at last Sue said, “I must go, really. There will be no time for potatoes, but there's liver and bacon for dinner.”

“You'll go,” he agreed, throwing down his brush, “but you'll go rest. I've told you we're having bread and cheese today—it's been a splendid morning.”

It had been a busy day in Mr. Bulloch's shop, but now the stream of customers was slackening, and Mr. Bulloch left Hickie in charge and mounted the stairs to his house.

“I'll be off now,” he said to his wife. “Hickie will see to everything. I'll be back to supper most likely.”

“I'll just expect ye when I see ye,” replied Mrs. Bulloch comfortably. “Maybe ye'll stay and take supper with Sue.”

Mr. Bulloch put on his overcoat and took his soft hat off the peg, but he still lingered. “I'm wishing I knew what to say,” he murmured. “It's difficult.”

“Ye'll soon see what to say. I never knew ye to be at a loss yet and I've known ye forty-seven years come February. Away with ye, Thomas, or ye'll miss the bus.”

“I wouldn't be weeping over it if I did,” muttered Thomas as he shut the door and descended the front stairs to the street.

It was a fine evening, cold and starry, a thin film of ice was forming on the moist pavements as Bulloch walked down to the Market Cross. He caught the bus with a few minutes to spare and very soon he was well on his way to Tog's Mill. The bus stopped at the top of the hill for him to alight, and he stood—as Sue had stood that first night—and watched the lights disappear down the road before descending the rough track to the house.

Mr. Bulloch had been pressed into this adventure by the importunities of his wife. He did not see what good could come of it, but he had no alternative suggestion to offer and he realized that something must be done. It was bad enough for Sue to take any sort of job, and this job was “queer”—they both felt that. Sue was too young to be shut up alone with a man, and Darnay, being an artist, was an unknown quantity to the Bullochs. He might be all right or he might not. The situation of Tog's Mill did not help to reassure the Bullochs—Tog's Mill was a queer place, deserted, solitary.

Mr. Bulloch had come to Tog's Mill as a plenipotentiary. He was to see how the land lay and try to persuade Sue to come home. If possible he was to have a “wee crack” with Darnay himself and suggest that another housekeeper be found—it was a delicate mission.

Sue was very much surprised when she answered the door and found her grandfather standing on the step.

“There's nothing wrong, is there?” she asked anxiously.

“What should be wrong?” he inquired. “Can I not come see ye without ye thinking something's wrong?”

Sue hesitated. “Come in, then,” she said reluctantly.

He came in, well aware of her reluctance and considerably alarmed by it, and found Mr. Darnay sitting by the kitchen fire.

“This is my grandfather, Mr. Darnay,” declared Sue, and she washed her hands of the situation.

Mr. Darnay was quite equal to it. In fact, he seemed unaware that there was a situation at all. He rose and shook hands with Mr. Bulloch and invited him to sit down.

“This is the only warm room in the house,” he said, laughing, “so I'm allowed to sit here—it's a great privilege I can tell you. The fact is we're short of coal and the coal merchant has refused to deliver his black diamonds until the end of the week.”

“It's a comfortable kitchen,” Mr. Bulloch said.

“You two will want a little chat,” declared Darnay, “so I'll just leave you to it.”

“No, no!” cried Mr. Bulloch. “That'll never do, Mr. Darnay. There's no earthly need for ye to go freeze in a cold room—I'm not staying long anyway.”

“But you must stay to supper.”

There was a good deal of argument about it, but eventually they both gave in. Mr. Darnay remained by the kitchen fire and Mr. Bulloch stayed to supper. The two men sat down in a friendly manner and Sue resumed her place at the table near the lamp, for she was mending the linen, and light was necessary for the task.

Sue had been considerably embarrassed by her grandfather's unexpected arrival, but now she saw that everything was all right, for they were talking to each other in the friendliest way imaginable. She listened to their talk with a queer inner excitement, surprised to find that they had so much in common. She had known her grandfather all her life, of course, but she had never heard him talk like this—it was quite a shock to find that there was so much more in him than she had suspected.

Somehow or other they had plunged straight into an argument about faith. (It was not remarkable that Darnay should talk about faith, for he would talk about anything, and his mind was packed full of information upon every subject under the sun, but that her grandfather should discuss such a subject with a perfect stranger was almost incredible. Indeed, unless Sue had heard him with her own ears, she would not have believed it.) Darnay was swift and keen. He went straight at the root of things and outran Mr. Bulloch, but Bulloch was very sure. He had thought a great deal and, arriving at certain conclusions, knew his reasons for that arrival.

“You can't get anything worth having for nothing,” Darnay declared, offering his guest a fill of tobacco from his pouch, “and faith is worth having—it's the only thing that can save us now, when the whole world has straws in its hair. Faith is worth working for.”

Bulloch considered this while he filled his pipe.

“To some people it's a leap in the dark,” Darnay continued earnestly. “To others, a struggle, like the time Israel wrestled with God. To others it's a search (but I think you must have had it and lost it before you can search for it), like the woman who lost the piece of silver and had to sweep out the whole house before she found it.”

“We've fought for it,” Mr. Bulloch put in, “and it was more real then—more important to us.”

“Your Covenanters fought for the right to interpret faith in their own way.”

“That's what I was meaning. Ye've got to have freedom first. It's no use believing what other folks say; the only thing is for each man to fend for himself, Mr. Darnay. Each man standing on his own feet, finding his own path—”

“Grand!” cried Darnay with flashing eyes. “It's a religion of super men.”

“It's a religion of free men,” Bulloch replied.

Sue left them hard at it and busied herself with preparations for supper. She was surprised to find her hands trembling as she took the dishes from the shelf.
How happy I am!
she thought suddenly and stood there for a moment with one hand pressed to her bosom, where her heart was beating fast. How happy she was—yet what was there to cause such a turmoil of happiness within her?

When she returned to the kitchen with her tray, Darnay was talking hard, and Bulloch, sitting forward in his chair, was listening intently to the flow of words.

“…never a Scottish painter yet who had the insight to paint the soul of Scotland,” Darnay was declaring. “You must look outside your own land for a man to do justice to the Scottish scene.”

“But a Scotsman must surely understand his own land better than another.”

Darnay laughed. “Does a chicken inside an egg know what the egg looks like?”

“No, no!” cried Bulloch. “It's not a fair comparison, that. Who knows the house best, Mr. Darnay? I'm thinking it's the person who lives in it.”

“Perhaps he knows it so well that he doesn't see it anymore—that is possible, you know.”

“Raeburn—” began Bulloch doubtfully.

“For portraits, yes, I'll give you Raeburn,” Darnay interrupted with a generous wave of his hand. “He was influenced by Reynolds, of course, and perhaps a little by Velasquez, but you can have Raeburn. He painted his own people well, I'll agree. He saw them and painted them.”

“What are ye meaning by that?” Mr. Bulloch inquired. “When ye say ‘he saw them.'”

“Raeburn was dignified and simple and these qualities belong to your race. Compare him with Rubens—a much greater painter but a less worthy man. Rubens loved life and enjoyed it. Even if we knew nothing about the man we could deduce these facts from his work. His women are plump and rotund, zestful and rosy, with pleasant curves and comfortable bosoms; compare them with the thin anemic ladies of Burne Jones and the coldness of Botticelli's saints.”

“Ye mean a painter paints in his own nature,” said Bulloch slowly.

“He can only paint what he sees and he can only see what he is capable of seeing.”

At supper Darnay tried to control his tongue—which was apt to run away with him in the company of a sympathetic listener—and to allow Miss Bun and her grandfather a fair share of the conversation, but Sue did not want to talk. She could have talked to either of her companions separately, but she could find nothing suitable for them both together. Her position was difficult and she was glad when supper was finished and Darnay, who had already informed Mr. Bulloch that he was making some studies of “Miss Bun,” suggested a visit to the studio.

Mr. Bulloch followed his host into the studio with mixed feelings. He was bewildered by Darnay, for the man was entirely different from what he had expected. The man had definite—if somewhat unconventional—ideas upon religious matters and could back his arguments with incidents from “The Book” and this was not Mr. Bulloch's preconceived idea of an artist. He remembered suddenly the reason for which he had come to Tog's Mill and found it more distasteful than ever. Mr. Darnay was a real gentleman in the highest sense of the word; he was blade straight, and Sue was perfectly safe with him (Bulloch was sure of it). But Bulloch saw another danger that was almost as fearsome—supposing Sue were to fall in love with the man; that would be a nice kettle of fish! The two of them were very much in harmony, he could see, and their expression when they looked at each other was kindly and understanding, more like the kindly look of folk long married than a lover's glance, but—
Dear sakes!
thought Mr. Bulloch, horrified to find where he was heading.
Dear sakes, what am I thinking about! The man's far above Sue as the stars, and married to boot. I'll need to take care what I say to Susan or she'll have the whole thing out of me before I know.

He was hoping that the pictures of Sue would help to solve the problem (for hadn't Darnay said that a painter must paint what he sees?), and he scarcely dared to raise his eyes and look at them in case Darnay had painted her in the Rubens manner: “zestful and rotund” with a “comfortable bosom.” If Darnay had seen her like that he would need to speak—no matter what it cost him he would need to take Sue straight home.

“Well,” said Darnay, “there you are, Mr. Bulloch. It isn't a good light, of course.”

“Well!” said Mr. Bulloch. “Well, I never!”

“You like it?”

“It's Sue,” declared her grandfather. “It's—well, it's just Sue. I can see her breathing, almost.”

“You think it good?” Darnay inquired casually, trying to hide the absurd pleasure he felt at the old man's astonishment and delight.

“Man, it's wonderful!” cried Bulloch. “It's the cleverest thing—I've seen her look like that a hundred times! I've seen her turn her head and raise her chin—she was affronted, eh?”

Darnay laughed. “I'm afraid I annoyed her on purpose,” he admitted.

“Vairy reprehensible!” declared Mr. Bulloch with a twinkle in his eye. “But maybe the end justifies the means.”

“How d'you like the other one?” Darnay asked.

“The other? It's a wondering look, Mr. Darnay. I've not seen her like that somehow—Sue's too practical for dreams.”

“I saw her like that.”

“I'm not saying ye didn't. I'm only saying it's not the Sue I know,” began Mr. Bulloch, and then he paused suddenly. This was not the Sue
he
knew, but Mr. Darnay knew her like that—knew her with that wondering, rapt look transfiguring her small determined face
. I'll need to say it
, he thought and added aloud and somewhat abruptly, “We're wanting Sue home, Mr. Darnay.”

“You're what?”

“We're wanting her home,” repeated Mr. Bulloch and left it at that.

For a moment, Darnay was silent, and then he said, “Well, of course—Miss Bun must do as she pleases. I mean—”

“But it's not Sue,” explained her grandfather. “It's ourselves—wanting her. She would not be pleased if she knew I had spoken about it.”

“I think you must decide that yourselves,” Darnay said, and all at once he was a thousand miles away.

Bulloch knew he had been put in his place, and perhaps he deserved it, for he had been admitted to Mr. Darnay's friendship and had presumed upon it. He saw now that he should never have approached Darnay behind Sue's back. He would have liked to apologize for his error of judgment, but it was not in his nature to apologize: he was too proud, too independent to own himself in the wrong.

Bulloch stood there for a moment without speaking, and then he felt Darnay's hand on his shoulder. “I'm glad you like the portraits, Mr. Bulloch,” Darnay said in a friendly voice. “I'd like to give you that one if you will accept it.”

“But, Mr. Darnay—”

“It's just a study, you see, and when I've finished my picture I shan't want it, so if you'd care to have it—”

“But I couldn't!” cried Bulloch in dismay. “I couldn't take it—unless—unless ye'd let me pay for it. I couldn't accept it from ye.”

“And I couldn't sell it,” declared Darnay, smiling and shaking his head. “It's just a study, and I don't in the least know what it's worth—precious little really. Perhaps you'd allow me to give it to Miss Bun's grandmother—how would that do?”

It made very little difference, Bulloch thought. He was most uncomfortable, and his discomfort was augmented by the knowledge that Darnay had no intention of heaping coals of fire upon his head. Darnay was impulsive and his offer was spontaneous and genuinely kind, but it put Mr. Bulloch in a very awkward position—there was not a doubt of that. It complicated the whole situation, so that he could see no way of escape. To refuse the picture would be ungrateful and boorish, and yet, if they accepted it, how could they drag Sue away? He saw quite clearly that even if they didn't accept it there was no certainty of being able to drag Sue away.